Despair
by Blodeuedd
Summary: Anakin’s pained reflections after his return to Coruscant from Mustafar. Hopefully more interesting than it sounds. Contains mild and very predictable Episode 3 spoilers. Rated for some serious third degree burns.


Despair

By Blodeuedd

_They gave me a drug which slowed the healing of wounds._

from _A Valediction Forbidding Mourning_, by Adrienne Rich

* * *

The pain begins first as a gentle prickling. As though millions of invisible, poignant needles are digging into his skin, piercing vein, muscle, sinew, nerve. 

He slowly becomes conscious as the sensation slowly escalates with every pale and reviving sense, until it is a mounting wave of blistering agony, poised to fall. This swell of torture falls the instant he opens his shattered eyes.

The feeling is so mindlessly, obscenely unbearable that he doesn't even hear his own wordless, animal scream.

Panting, fighting to force air through torn lungs, he struggles to recover his reeling mind. He doesn't have to look at his body to know that the flames have utterly devastated it. Even if he had wanted to survey the damage, the action of lifting his head and torso to look upon his charred husk of a body would have been so tortuous as to be impossible.

There is a ringing in his destroyed ears, the whine of some crazed inner beast. Is he deaf? He cannot tell. There isn't enough logic left in his derelict skull to tell.

Through the dancing, spiraling black that obscures his vision, he sees the faint, pain-marred silhouettes of droids working furiously on him, testing limbs that no longer exist, numbing things he cannot see.

Mouth full of blood, he screams again at their horrendously careless work and tries to flinch away. But another cresting wall of hurt stops all effort, all thought. The all-encompassing pain is not merely the ache of weary muscles; each singular part of him shrieks and vies for attention, creating a vociferous roar of misery. It is like suffering every conceivable physical ailment all at once.

Even thoughts hurt, he realizes as he tries to flee the realm of the physical for the mental. But their hurt is different. Unlike his corporeal wounds, the pain of his memories runs deep, to the arcane core of his soul.

The little boy from Mos Espa is lost. Dead. His bright blue eyes are open, but empty, staring. The boy's slight body lies in the corner of his wounded mind, sprawled across the silent corpses of more slaughtered younglings. The brightest of stars in a dead sky.

_You were the Chosen One. . ._

No. He forcibly directs his thoughts elsewhere, gritting burned and blackened teeth.

He might have been Anakin Skywalker, once. But no more.

Who is he now? He cannot answer his own question; he lurches and struggles through a wall of blood and bones and innards to find a response. It's like being born again.

A monster. A demon, like the ones in the bedtime stories from his childhood. The boy he had been was frightened of them then; now, the destroyed man can only look on them with an understanding that is terrible to accept.

He understands them. He knows them. Because he is one of them.

He is a Sith Lord.

A steel-tempered anger rises in him, and he remembers his strength. The Force has not left him. He drinks deep of the darkness, clinging to it.

Metal scraping against his exposed bones forces him back to burning alertness as the droids continue their fiendish doctoring. But now his spirit hungrily endures the pain, letting his passionate rage quench his senses until they are numbed.

He does not think clearly again until he wakes once more, for the final time.

Author's Note:

I am a longtime Star Wars fan, but this is my first finished Star Wars fan fiction work. After watching _Episode III _(twice as of now!) on the big screen, I felt very much inspired to write a short bit about Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader's reactions and thoughts after his return to Coruscant from his climatic duel with Obi-Wan Kenobi on Mustafar.

_Despair _is also one of the most graphic pieces I have ever written. It may seem like milky fluff to many hardened individuals, but this is one of my first significant attempts at a story which doesn't shy away from gory detail.

So there you have it. This piece is an amalgamation of not one but two major firsts for me. Please let a newcomer to both this genre of fan fiction and this style of writing know what you think!

May the Force be with you. :-)

Blodeuedd


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